I just completed several additional rounds of split testing on my Stock Trading Riches website, similar to the testing I did last March.
In last year's test, I pitted the original long one-page site against both a short one-page site, and a multiple short page site. The original page beat them badly.
In the recent tests, I compared:
1. A repeat of last year's test. This was a waste of time - I got the same results as last time, and just need to accept the fact that my "amateurish" page works - there is no reason to feel envious of professionally designed pages.
2. The large picture of my book cover against an Amazon widget. The big picture won.
3. I tested whether to continue giving the spreadsheet as a bonus for purchasing the book, or giving it as a free download from the sales page.
(First, a little background. When developing my system, I had written the testing scripts in Awk and Perl. I included these scripts in the book, along with instructions for downloading free versions of Perl and Awk.
A reader of my book, who works at a hedge fund, wrote to me and suggested the spreadsheet. It turns out that a lot of traders and investors like using Microsoft Excel. So, thanks to the reader, I now have an Excel spreadsheet version.
The results of allowing anyone to download the spreadsheet were that only a small percentage of readers downloaded the spreadsheet, and sales decreased.
Now, the sales decrease was similar to the decrease early last year, when I briefly offered my book for sale as an Ebook. This reinforces the conclusion I reached then, that sales are maximized when a prospect to your sales page only has one decision to make.
Here I was again offering two choices: yes/no to buy the book, and yes/no to download the spreadsheet.
4. I tested opt-in boxes and free offers. I created a whole series of autoresponder messages. My personal feeling is that I don't like autoresponders. In this case, it proved true. My long one-page sales letter beats opt-in - even when including orders that came in during the autoresponder series.
Conclusions - why my website sales page works:
1. To put it a little crudely, the Stock Trading Riches sales page gets in your face. It uses a large font in bold. It uses a large picture of my book cover, which beats the smaller picture in the Amazon widget. But, people read it. I get a lot of sales and Google Analytics shows that the average time on the page is high - almost 5 minutes. It beats the time people spend reading individual blog posts.
2. The text is broken into "chunks" with red subheadings. I use yellow highlighting. This makes the page easy to scan. My tests on this long page versus multiple short page site shows that readers are more willing to scroll than click links.
3. The page focuses on one thing - promoting my book on Amazon.com. Whenever I add any other links besides the link to the Amazon.com page, sales go down.
3. There is a call to action. Near the end of the text, I actually tell the reader to invest in their future and buy the book from Amazon.com.
In last year's test, I pitted the original long one-page site against both a short one-page site, and a multiple short page site. The original page beat them badly.
In the recent tests, I compared:
1. A repeat of last year's test. This was a waste of time - I got the same results as last time, and just need to accept the fact that my "amateurish" page works - there is no reason to feel envious of professionally designed pages.
2. The large picture of my book cover against an Amazon widget. The big picture won.
3. I tested whether to continue giving the spreadsheet as a bonus for purchasing the book, or giving it as a free download from the sales page.
(First, a little background. When developing my system, I had written the testing scripts in Awk and Perl. I included these scripts in the book, along with instructions for downloading free versions of Perl and Awk.
A reader of my book, who works at a hedge fund, wrote to me and suggested the spreadsheet. It turns out that a lot of traders and investors like using Microsoft Excel. So, thanks to the reader, I now have an Excel spreadsheet version.
The results of allowing anyone to download the spreadsheet were that only a small percentage of readers downloaded the spreadsheet, and sales decreased.
Now, the sales decrease was similar to the decrease early last year, when I briefly offered my book for sale as an Ebook. This reinforces the conclusion I reached then, that sales are maximized when a prospect to your sales page only has one decision to make.
Here I was again offering two choices: yes/no to buy the book, and yes/no to download the spreadsheet.
4. I tested opt-in boxes and free offers. I created a whole series of autoresponder messages. My personal feeling is that I don't like autoresponders. In this case, it proved true. My long one-page sales letter beats opt-in - even when including orders that came in during the autoresponder series.
Conclusions - why my website sales page works:
1. To put it a little crudely, the Stock Trading Riches sales page gets in your face. It uses a large font in bold. It uses a large picture of my book cover, which beats the smaller picture in the Amazon widget. But, people read it. I get a lot of sales and Google Analytics shows that the average time on the page is high - almost 5 minutes. It beats the time people spend reading individual blog posts.
2. The text is broken into "chunks" with red subheadings. I use yellow highlighting. This makes the page easy to scan. My tests on this long page versus multiple short page site shows that readers are more willing to scroll than click links.
3. The page focuses on one thing - promoting my book on Amazon.com. Whenever I add any other links besides the link to the Amazon.com page, sales go down.
3. There is a call to action. Near the end of the text, I actually tell the reader to invest in their future and buy the book from Amazon.com.
